Sunday, February 7, 2010

Photovan does Te Toto gorge .

June 29 2008 :This afternoon the rain and clouds cleared away after a week or two of bad weather so I headed for the te Toto gorge to see what it was like .The road there showed some promise .

so I parked my ''photovan'' and went for a walk .

first to the lookout .

maybe I should go back in better light .

anyway I walked in the wrong direction for half an hour since there are no signs but it was worth the scenery .

no prizes for guessing which way the wind blows here .

I'll have to plan a full day of exploring next time because the scenery is "acceptable"

The sea was very frothy from all the bad weather .

a couple of "wrong way" dead-ends .

a cabbage tree ...

Then I went through some trees and got blocked by some thorns and had to pull out "junior" [ There was no place in my pack for "senior" the machete ]

and a quick self-timer shot through the grass

all that to find out I was supposed to go in this direction to get all the way down to the sea - maybe next time ...

July 6 2008 :

Today I went back since the weather was looking good . I had a look from the platform .

Looked across to my left .

.

And decided to walk to the bottom . It took 15 minutes to get to the first flat area but after that it was long curled up grass , thigh deep in places .

This time I concentrated on ''detail shots'' as an addition to the normal landscape shots .

I called this formation ''the eagle'' because it looks a bit like one from the side . In this case the sun popped through the clouds at the right time to highlight it . The lookout platform is a tiny speck on the top left of the picture .

some more trees with potential ... maybe I should go back at night - in summer of course .